Column: For high school athletics, Ticket Spicket is a mixed bag

All that glisters is not gold;

Often have you heard that told.

— William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”

Thanks to the fears of COVID-19, the popularity of online ticket purchase to high school sporting events has snowballed. This quick, convenient method to purchase tickets was the brainchild of a couple of East Coast entrepreneurs who have watched their company, Ticket Spicket, expand to 16,500, K-12 schools across the country.

Ticket Spicket’s parent company, HomeTown Ticketing, Inc., calls its service a game changer for high school athletic departments. It claims that by employing its company, schools will generate more ticket sales and boost fan enjoyment. Furthering its partnership with schools, Ticket Spicket has been endorsed by the National Interscholastic Athletic Association.

With the winter sports season in full swing, skeptics wonder whether this method of ticket distribution is more detrimental to our scholastic sports than it is worth. Is the cost-saving elimination of the ticker seller and ticket taker worth turning off potential attendees who find it difficult to download the Ticket Spicket’s app to their smartphones?

Apparently, high school athletic directors are all gung ho for Ticket Spicket because the accounting work is done for them. Profits and attendance stats from year-to-year are kept and can be used for comparison. The chores of assigning and paying a ticket seller and ticket taker have been eliminated, and with fewer fans attending games, management details have been simplified.

If you want to attend a game today, it is understood that you must have access to a smartphone. If you are beginning to get the feeling that Big Brother is trying to influence you to think or do something you normally wouldn’t do, you are not alone.

The spectators most likely to acquiesce to Ticket Spicket’s new era of high school ticket purchasing are the parents of the student-athletes. One noticeable outcome is that families don’t have to scramble for a seat in the nearly empty bleachers.

Another consequence of Ticket Spicket is the unrealized profits at the concession stand because of fewer attendees.

For those students whose families can afford the ticket price, they also have to contend with Ticket Spicket’s add-on convenience fee. Another glitch is that all ticketing needs to be completed by an adult who has a credit card. Some potential fans find the contactless, impersonal technology intimidating and frustrating and become leery of entering sensitive financial information into cyberspace. Thus, many irritated fans choose to forgo attending games altogether.

But the biggest losers are the competing student-athletes and their classroom peers. With Ticket Spicket suppressing attendance and with no more pandemic, why are we still doing business with this company?

When high school teachers want to have a date night with their spouses to attend a game and support their students, they, too, are required to pay a $1.70 Ticket Spicket convenience fee plus the regular cost of admission.

What is becoming clear is that the use of Ticket Spicket by the Hawaii High School Athletics Association has exacerbated the poor attendance at scholastic athletic events. Would finding creative ways to subsidize students’ extracurricular activities be a good investment? A family of three, coaches’ families included, would have to pay $61.20 in convenience fees alone to support their athlete throughout a 24-game schedule. We don’t want our last line of support for interscholastic sports to be priced out to see their child play sports.

What has proven to be a good money-making scheme has not proven to be good for attendance at our school athletic events. Ticket Spicket may work well for University of Hawaii athletics, but it has not proven to be beneficial for Hawaii’s interscholastic sports.

Ticket Spicket does nothing positive for our kids’ sports programs, so why should we continue to utilize it?

It should be discontinued.

Charles “Chic” Hess, Ed.D., is a retired physical education teacher and basketball coach.